======================================== *** THE INNER SWINE *** Volume 2, Issue 2, September 1996 www.innerswine.com ======================================== "We are all worms, but I do believe I am a glowworm." - Winston Churchil CONCEPT BY Jeff Somers, Robert Gala, Ken West, Jeof Vita COVER ART BY Jeof Vita EDITOR: Jeffrey Somers INSPIRATION: Certainly not Dave Matthews ADVICE & FREE DRINKS: No one yet, but I still have hope PROOFREADER EXTRAORDINAIRE: Karen Accavallo SUBMISSION SOLICITOR/ DISTRIBUTION TZAR/ OVERALL OFFICIAL COOL CHICK: Lauren Strutzel OFFICIAL SONG: "Isn't it Grand, Boys" by the Clancy Brothers, because I wouldn't want my death to get my friends down, or anything. FRIENDS OF THE SWINE: Lauren Strutzel, my lovely friend who continues to prove her value by being difficult; R. A. for a lot of things, but mostly just for calling me every now and then; Jeof Vita, for telling me his stupid idea about the indians that got the Evil Boys out of bed and for (almost) forgetting that I owed him a night of drinks; Misty Sue Quinn, who keeps hanging around no matter what secrets I tell her when I'm drunk and despite the fact that I take everything personally (I still disagree with her.....about just about everything); Elizabeth Augoustiniatos, for slumming down to my level for all these years - incredible women should not waste their time on idiots like me; Mike Haberman, for trying to buy a subscription at his wife's insistence; Ken West who still laughs at my jokes after all these years; Acclaim Comics and Jeff Gomez for not letting a little nepotism ruin a good story; Burping Lula for being honest in their review (but then they mailed me that ridiculous crap about conspiracies and I lost all respect for them), Godeater for not throwing away that second issue; Karen Accavallo for tolerating my many faults of which she is compiling the definitive list, Angela Marshall and Nicole Fagan for getting in touch; Cassie Moore, for not acting her age. ======================================== TABLE OF CONTENTS ======================================== EDITORIAL: PIG IN SHIT #5, "Sinning for Fun and Profit (follow your instincts and you will end up in jail) FICTION: "Steve and Steve's Startling Shadow Show" COMMENTARY: "Those Were the Days (If Nothing Else, We Have Television) FICTION: "Just As Before" RAGE-FILLED IDIOCY: "Karen Accavallo's Book of Lists" FICTION: "No Great Trick" COMMENTARY: "Bachelorhood Ad Infinitum (Thank God I am Alone) OUR WEEKLY DOSE OF FILLER: "She's So Beautiful, I Swear I'd Sleep with Her Brother" FICTION: "From my Youth, and Before" ---------------------------------------- The Inner Swine Volume 2 Issue 2. Magazine published May, September, and January by Oinking Sow, Inc. (There is no company, really) Individual subscription rates: $9.00 (cheap!) per year in U.S.; $15.00 (cheap!) per year foreign including Canada. Single Copy $3.00 (cheap!) plus $1.50 (cheap!) for postage and handling if ordered by mail, and if you do order a subscription I promise to send you Misty Sue Quinn's phone number, just for kicks. Checks payable to Jeff Somers, Editor. Address submissions and correspondence to Jeff Somers, The Inner Swine, 293 Griffith Street #9, Jersey City, NJ 07307. But if you send me something, make it good or I will be angered. All submissions or requests for Guidelines (there are no guidelines, though) must be accompanied by S.A.S.E. Thanks for reading this, so few people take the time to notice the little things in life, like boilerplates and small print, it touches me that you'd sit there with your lamp on, late at night, curled up and wearing your bifocals, and read this really dull crap. Thanks! ======================================== *** EDITORIAL *** Pig In Shit #5: Sinning for Fun and Profit (follow your natural instincts and you will end up in jail) by Jeff Somers ======================================== "Jesus died for our sins? Well, I didn't know the man and I didn't ask him to, so he'll get no gratitude from me." - Anonymous Sin is one of those vague concepts that troubles the modern mind, or at least such modern minds as bother thinking these hollow days. The main problem, as always, is one of definition: what the hell is a sin anyway? The pope made not paying your taxes a sin at the last Bull session, if you follow the catholic gameplan you'll find that coveting your neighbor's wife is a sin. Speaking as a representative of the half of the population that suffers a sexual thought every eight seconds, this seems unreasonable. Especially so since every attractive gal seems to be someone's wife these days. Personally, when it comes to sin, I follow a simple Inner Swine credo which states that the perception of sin depends on the definition of moral -or, in other words, everything is legal in Jersey as long as you don't get caught. As Americans (and I take this title despite the fact that I do nothing to earn it like voting, just to piss people off who self-righteously tell me to love it or leave it when I choose to simply disdain it) we have a dangerous tendency to confuse lawful activity with moral activity, that is to say we make the mistake of assuming our legal code is a moral one. The concept is ridiculous, considering that most of the people I know wouldn't know a sound moral sense if it fell on them and crippled them more or less permenantly (as sound morals tend to do). That some of these yokels might take sufficient interest in the laws and policies of this country to take a hand in creating them is a growing nightmare of mine. Along these same lines one has to wonder if someone like Ted Kennedy really has the moral firepower to decide right from wrong and, god help us, legislate it. Of course, we have to make the attempt, or society falls apart pretty quickly. Why? Simple! We are born sinners. We like to sin, we enjoy sin, we engage in it pretty enthusiastically. And why not? We're just fucking animals, might as well enjoy it while it lasts. In the interests of fun and frolic, let's take a look at the Seven Deadly Sins that are supposed to make our eternal souls permenant cheese whiz. I won't enrage my readers with yet another tirade about how these things are merely intellectual constructs designed to preserve a fragile society. I get into enough fights with my ridiculous opinions as it is. But sin is a fascinating topic, so let's dive in and get a little dirty -come and oink with me. We'll start with something reasonable, and work up from there: GLUTTONY: not a nice word, with a lot of unpleasant images involved. What the hell is a glutton, anyway? Someone who intentionally consumes more than they need to. Hmmmn, that about describes the entire United States of America, if you ask most people, including the ubiquitous Dave Matthews (whose hit song Too Much, is all about american over-consumption). We're a nation of fat idiots playing video games and complaining when the waitress doesn't fill our coffee cup enough times, a nation of drones who bitch when the bus is too crowded and who walk right by beggars in the streets with cheeseburger juice dribbling down our faces. The third world could be fed on our garbage. Face it, kids, if gluttony is a sin we might as well start fighting for the good bungalows on the Lake of Fire, cause that's where we'll all be come armageddon. The future leaders of this country are sitting in their parents living rooms right this second, stoned out of their minds, eating pounds of oreos and scratching themselves. Pigging out is not a sin. Neither is allowing yourself to slowly fill your living room, but man, it ought to be. GREED: This is close enough to gluttony, don't you think? Gluttony for money or material possessions. Greed might be regarded as tacky, but is it a sin? After all, we all experience greed in its basic form, which is a desire to be able to pay off our bills without having our legs broken in the process. The concept of financial security in this country is becoming more and more tenuous, as even billionaires declare bankruptcy, so while I regard a certain amount of money-madness to be rather annoying I do not regard it as a sin. Why, The Inner Swine is all about money! I am sorry if I don't regard greed as much of a sin. If you don't want us to desire riches, why do all the good things in life cost so damn much? Drooling over piles of money like a dog in heat is not a sin. Printing the stuff up in your basement on recycled paper, sadly, is. (As I know from painful experience). SLOTH: I personally support sloth, and cannot for the life of me see how this hurts anyone. This is one of those sins where the rather mundane origins of the concept show through: a slothful person is a drag on society, consuming but not producing. This naturally needs to be curtailed and discouraged, or else you might have huge numbers of the population sitting about eating ho-hos and watching TV, giving nothing to the rest of the world. The easiest way to stop the cow-minded drones of the world from sitting about watching Dave Matthews Band videos and playing with themselves is to make it a friggin sin to do so. If its not a sin to be slothful, after all, why do we bother to do anything beyond the absolutely necessary? Sitting in bed complaining all day is not a sin. Your cable bill, sadly, will not be paid, though. WRATH: Okay, wrath has a whole slew of bad things associated with it. Bar fights, war, the Unabomber, etc. Angry people are usually destructive. As Mike Muir said so well nearly 15 years ago: "We're afraid you're going to hurt somebody. We're afraid you're going to hurt yourself!" But anger is also a normal and natural human instinct; it's what tells us we're being fucked with, and it gives us the temporary means to deal with it. I for one fully support anger, it keeps you going when all the wimpier emotions have left you, it provides its own built-in logic that borders on insane genius and without it we would have no more TV movies starring Donna Mills or Meredith Baxter. None of us, I don't think, want that. Boiling with rage because you're friends ignore you in a bar is not a sin. Breaking beer bottles over their heads in rage, sadly, is. ENVY: I have enough envy to fill the world with my green rage and still have some left over. Does this make me a bad guy? No, it makes me normal. Whether or not you approve of envy as an icebreaker in awkward social situations, however, does it really count as a sin? Do we really kid ourselves that we have that much control over our dim, slow lives? Envy is very often the only ambitious factor in someone's life, the only reason we get off our padded asses and do something with the gifts we have not yet managed to squander. While it isn't pretty, usually, and as a personal challenge I would hope to someday get past it and love everyone equally and without rancor, right now I view it as an unfortunate fact of life, but not a sin. Sin is such a strong word, reserved for murder and rooting for the Dallas Cowboys. Envying some guy because he's gotten laid in the last century or so is not a sin. Killing him because of it, sadly, is. LUST: Now you've got to be shitting me. God says go forth and multiply, and we're supposed to believe lust is a sin? Lust in and of itself is once again a natural, even a biological, function. Without it we would have drifted off to racial sleep a long time ago. The Big Sleep. Extinction. After all, no matter what my fellow men might say, or what I might say when I'm being especially charming to my young lady friends in bars, the main reason we tolerate women is sex (Write those letters, kids, can't wait to read 'em) and, no doubt, vice versa, and if we didn't have this persistent urge to merge we would just sit around the bonfire and spit at our fellow men/women and after about seventy years all that'd be left would be a few scattered urns, or something. Lusting after someone, even lusting after a particularly rosey-cheeked and comely Nun, I say, is no sin. Jumping her in the Sacristy, sadly, is. PRIDE: This term has two definitions, of course, and we want the bad one, as always. When you baby's first steps make you proud, everyone claps you on the back and lies to you about how cute they are. When you're immense power and frightening influence make you Proud, you are guilty of hubris or some such ancient sin. Arrogance is an ungainly and unattractive personality trait, of course, but a sin? Thinking that you're too good to ride the bus like the rest of us grunts makes you an asshole, fer sure, but it's not a sin. Getting laws passed forbidding people to speak to you in publis, sadly, is. Now you may find yourself saying: Jeff, it sounds like nothing is a sin to your twisted, depraved sensibilities. Surely something must count against your record!. Of course you're thinking that, you lily-livered god-fearers and teatotalers. How I loathe you all. In answer to that question I reply that I do not consider mere thoughts to be sins, and I define sins as such actions which directly and negatively impact the good of society. In short, we come back to my whole rant about how it's all about protecting society. If you dream of murdering your rich wife and running off with your secretary (and thats like 3 or 4 deadly sins all rolled up into one bloodthirsty vision) you are no more a sinner than you are a martian. If you clobber your wife with a pound box of Flav-Or-Ices and run off to sunny Mexcio with the money and your doxie, then you are. If thinking sinfully is a sin itself, then I might as well give up all pretext of restraint and enjoy myself before they catch me, 'cause I'm damned already, and I don't want a cure, I run from the cure. Hee-hee! In our ongoing american obsession with the idiotic concept of legislating morality, it has come to the point in our story where doing what comes naturally will most likely land you in jail. You can't even have interesting sex in some states without jailtime being involved (which, ironically, usually leads to even more interesting sex) and so in our twisted quest for an ordered life we find ourselves forced to behave contrary to our natural principals. It sucks. Sigh. Happily, saying so still isn't a sin. The levying of oppression under the guise of moral guidance is an old trick of the bloated assholes who run this world, refuse to be lulled into a catholic orgy of penance and you will go far. Minor miracles for small-time sinners, is my motto, and minor miracles are all we get these days, and damned few of them, too. My advice is: commit a small sin every day, just to keep your hand in, and if you ever do find yourself up for judgement in some nether-dimension, feel free to pull out The Inner Swine and blame it on me. What's one or two extra eternities, after all? ======================================== *** FICTION *** Steve and Steve's Startling Shadow Show by Jeff Somers ======================================== The theater was small but the act was big, so the place was packed, a humming crowd of expectancy. The posters outside showed a tall, handsome man smiling in a tuxedo, one hand comradely onthe shined shoes of an obviously hung man. The poster declared it to be "Steve and Steve......performers with a twist." The lights were still up, stage hands occasionally jogging to and fro on the stage while casually dressed people waited politely, chatting and pointing out stage details where they could see them. Men talked to their wives and girlfriends carefully, arms loosely around shoulders in civilized signs of possession. Groups of singles scattered like islands in a sea of matrimony chatted amongst themselves and occassionally flirted. Everyone's eyes kept flicking to the stage, waiting for the fun to begin. They talked, low and calm: they traded favorite tracks and skits -the hanging of the second Steve was quite popular, but it was an old favorite; most people thought of the much newer suicide bit, first done in New York a few weeks before, where the whole front row got splattered in warm stage blood. It was new and almost no one in the theater had seen it. The people in the front row particularly hoped it was included, thinking that a bloody shirt would be a perfect trophy from the show. Slowly, the lights dimmed. Breaking the illusion of calm, the crowd burst into applause, cheering loudly, filling the hall with senseless static, huge and spiky, frenzied and enthusiastic. A spotlight burst into being, and into the pool of white light stepped the second, shorter Steve, dressed in a dark blue suit and a white shirt. When it was obvious that the applause was ongoing, the Second Steve bowed low and held out his hands for it to stop. He was short and had dark hair, a sour-looking man with a scowling rat's face that sported a fine sarcastic smile that beamed hugely at the dark, hidden crowd before him. After a moment, silence muscled in. "I'd like to thank you all for coming tonight," the Second Steve bellowed effortlessly in a good stage voice, gesturing a new smattering of claps down, "and I welcome you to Steve and Steve's Startling Shadow Show -although," he continued, slowing down to let the crowd say the traditional phrase with him, "some of us might not be leaving the theater!" The applause went beyond the second Steve's ability to quell, and he simply thrust his hands into his pockets and waited for it to end on its own as they congratulated themselves. When it had quieted down enough to speak again, he looked up with a grin and went on. "I thought we might try something different tonight, Ladies and Gentlemen. I thought we might get on without Steve for a while, seeing that he's a little under the weather and all tied up -" Groans of disappointment were cut off and laughter erupted from the audience as the First Steve, tied to a chair in classic ransom style, hopped onstage, cursing and struggling, his dark blue suit askew and wrinkled. Growling, he hopped towards the Second Steve, who padded away, eluding him easily. "You sonofabitch, you goddamm sonofabitch! Ladies and gentlemen, there has been a heinous crime commited tonight!" The first Steve sputtered, pausing in his hopping to work on his bonds. "And if you'll give me a moment, I'll tell you all about it!" Somewhere, someone had turned on the dry ice machine, and eerie smoke spilled onto the stage. As the First Steve slowly escaped his bonds, the Second Steve looked on calmly, seeming to file his nails. "You take them in, folks," the First Steve panted, "and teach them the tricks of the trade, you show 'em how to get by and how to cheat stupid suckers such as yourselves -"a cheer burst forth from the crowd, and the Second Steve turned to smile at the crowd benignly "- and then they turn on you. They try to cheat you. They take your own tricks, your own scams, stab you in the heart with them and twist!" On the last word he stood, ropes falling to the floor, and towered at six foot five, a sweaty man with balled fists at his side. The crowd broke into applause, and the Second Steve backed away, looking this way and that and getting laughs. The First Steve stalked the second Steve around the stage for a few seconds, and the stopped, pulled a pistol from his pants, aimed and fired it at his partner. A bullet caught the Second Steve just as the smaller man turned to run; he twisted up acrobaticly and crumpled to the floor, red oozing every which way on the stage. The crowd erupted, guffaws mutating into cheers. The First Steve slowly turned to the audience and smiled, dropping the gun and bowing low. The crowd added some volume, and then died down. "Folks," he bellowed, still grinning hugely, "I thought we might try something different tonight!" The applause swarmed over him again; the crowd loved the twist. It didn't budge the Second Steve, who was almost hidden by cheap, fake smoke. "I thought we might get on without Steve for the rest of our lives!" Steve added exultantly, finding a cigarette and lighting it as the applause swelled again. Sweat sheened his flushed face and stained his white shirt; the cigarette dangled from his mouth as he walked to the right wing and plucked out a wooden stool. He put it down roughly in the center and sat down heavily, mopping his forehead with a white handkerchief and smoking for a dull moment as the crowd settled. Quiet, he plucked the cigarette from his mouth and smiled impishly. "I didn't mean for this to happen, folks." Chuckles washed over him gently. He waved them away. "It was an act of rage, an act of passion. And you're all witnesses to it. Should have seen it coming, I guess -no one but myself to blame." He mused over that as he located and lit a second cigarette, letting the first drop to smolder on stage. "I mean," sluggish, a spot-light finally found him, and the rest of the lights winked out. "Thanks, guys. I know that wasn't in the script." he said, glancing up. "I mean," he went on, looking down, "I mean, I can remember when Steve and I were just street trash, putting on three-card Monte pick-pocket shows and magic acts. There was this one time when we were doing a street corner act and for once we had a big crowd and for once they were digging the act and Steve was, as usual, being a pig bastard." An uncomfortable murmur rippled through the audience. An eyebrow went up on his damp face and his smile darkened. "That was the first time I considered killing Steve." His eyes shifted to slant at the smoke-hidden body. "But obviously, it wasn't the last." The audience relaxed and laughed again. The show was making sense at last. "That first time, he kept screwing up just to make me look bad. He was such an asshole." he chuckled to himself. "I just pulled a knife, went for him, and we rolled around. I was trying to stab him, folks, I was trying to kill him. And do you know what the crowd around us did, hmmmnn?" He waited, his smile slipping into the sly, his eyes moving back and forth across the audience. "They clapped, folks, they threw coins. I was trying to murder a man right in front of them, and they thought it was an act. Not only that, they thought it was the best act they's seen in a while." Silence had taken over and when he paused nothing stepped up to fill the emptiness. He smoked silently, staring out at nothing, and then went on. "We stopped and realized what people wanted -blood. Pain. Death. And so the Shadow Show was born. We gave all you ghouls a little cherry-syrup death and you paid for it. And paid for it. And paid for it." Heavy smoke spilled off the stage and began to cover the floor; pockets of people grew tired of waiting for the punch-line and began to shift and hum with boredom. "Twelve years, folks." Steve went on. "Twelve years we worked together, killing each other on stage. Twelve years I wanted to kill him for REAL." He shook his head, then looked up. "I guess a lot of you think this is part of the show. The show ended fifteen minutes ago, folks. It ended before it began." He tossed his cigarette aside and stood up. "This is for real! This REALLY HAPPENED!" He ran over to the Second Steve. "You wanted blood and it had to be better and better and it had to look real - you wanted this, you fucking ghouls!" he picked up the Second Steve's arms and dragged him to the edge of the stage. "You vampires wanted flesh!" He laughed. "Well, take him and enjoy!" With a heave the Second Steve went flying offstage, landing with a wet thump in an unnatural position before the front row, eyes open, drained, and blank. The front row leapt up as a whole and scattered, some diving over their row into other people, the rest filling the aisles. Cries sparked into the air and half the audience stood. The other half sat and waited. The lights stayed down and the smoke spilled off the stage and oozed over the Second Steve like thick water. "He's dead, people." The First Steve panted. "One of us won't be leaving the theater." a faint flickering smile blinked across his face. "It's been fifteen minutes, and none of you have called the cops." A few scattered groups chuckled, and slowly the joke spread, and everyone looked for the Second Steve to get up -the joke on them. But the Second Steve didn't move, he was dead. ======================================== *** COMMENTARY *** THOSE WERE THE DAYS: if nothing else, we have television (Living in the past is a fucking waste of time) by Jeff Somers ======================================== There are dimwits amongst us who, taking stock of the world in general (as wise people, I am told, will do when they are not engaged in other intellectual considerations, such as Singled Out) bemoan the state of things and wish for "the good old days". These are the sort of fever-inducing statements which get this pig frothing and cursing, eventually losing the affections of friends and relatives worldwide in an orgy of sarcasm, cursing, and, sadly, physical abuse. I once even got into a shoving match with a priest, which, if I'm being honest, I quite enjoyed. However, I digress: wanting to live in a previous time period (the favorites of these taffy-headed romantics being the 50s, 20s, or late 1800s) is ridiculous and shows, in my opinion, a dangerous proclivity towards fantasy. This is a sentiment expressed weekly by Archie Bunker on weekly reruns, after all; choose your philosophical allies with care, is my advice. Are modern times pretty sad? Sure. Pigs can't live in cleanliness and order, after all, we need slop and shit to spring into being. The lament of the sad modern world is as ancient as civilization itself, we as a race constantly question our progress and long for simpler times. Admittedly in 1996 there are plenty of reasons to not enjoy yourself (although as chief pig I refuse to ever give in to this dangerous tendency to brood; life's a party, I say, and I brought the bean dip): we have wars and terroism and AIDS and kids killing their parents and OJ on the loose and Beavis and Butthead and rampant drug use and corruption and Hootie and the Blowfish and gasp wheeze so much more. You can get shot for being an asshole driver, these days. You can live to regret that one night stand, if only briefly, these days. You can walk down 42nd street and want to throw up, these days. You can sit at home and watch the news and feel that old familiar rage build up inside you until you're convinced of nothing but the darkness of the world, and question the wisdom of bringing new people into it. The modern world is filled with famine, disease, death, the erosion of so-called "morals" and distrust, it pretty much sucks and you might as well roll over and go back to sleep this morning, because your job sure ain't worth it. At the risk of stating the obvious, however, I say that the past was worse. I am of course talking about the actual past, not the Fantasy-Island past where you get to wear costumes and have all sorts of adventures. They had wars, terrorism, crime and disease back then, too. Any back then. Sometimes they had it worse, sometimes better, and in the end it pretty much balances out, I think, with the one difference that technology was universally worse way back when and I for one am not giving up 30-second burritos at 7-11. You want to live in the 1800s? Ah, the victorian age, the days of Gone with the Wind and high morals. Except......violent crime in the major cities of the USA was actually higher in the late 1800s than it is today, and that includes murders and rapes. Funny that. I thought violent crime was a product of our decadent and capricious entertainment industry. Of course you also have to consider that labor conditions were atrocious back then, so you better hope you were born middle-class or better, because even if you land in the latter part of the century when slavery had been abolished all you have to do is investigate the building of americas railroads or the sweatshops of Hells Kitchen to find out that if you think your 20 grand a year sucks you haven't got a clue as to what poverty is. Health care was, naturally, not quite as advanced as it is today. If you were a woman in the 1800s, you had best keep smiling and try not to get depressed, because the doctors back then were dropping the word hysteria with alarming rapidity and you were still decades away from suffrage. A lot of our favorite diseases (Polio, Measles, et cetera) had not been cured or even successfully battled, and surgery was still an adventure, quite exciting but rarely successful. In short, the 1800s look idyllic in the movies and sound quaint in those Dickens novels, but the fact is this country was even more unfair, racially oppressive, and generally shitty to live in than it is today....unless of course you happened to be rich. Some things certainly are constants throughout time. Okay, maybe the 20s sound better. At least things had loosened up by then, women could vote, some of the modern conveniences had come into being, and gosh-darn it its a fashionable goddam decade. Of course you couldn't buy yourself a drink and there was even more violent crime, thanks to our friends the mafia. If you're looking for a more virtuous time period to live in (which is the inexplicable motive for many past-wishers; why would you ever want to give up pornography and THC, this humble editor asks) this isn't it. Newly acquired wealth and leisure time due to labor reforms and the flex of the USAs newly built muscle brought about a generation that first explored the wonderful world of cheap sex, hungover mornings, and godlessness. Sure, you still had Dorothy in Kansas going to church every sunday and saving herself for marriage, but around the edges the country had begun to fray. And if none of this bothers you, think of this: the Great Depression was not a fun thing to live through. The 50s? Hmmmnnn...sound promising. The popular image of the fifties is Grease and Sha Na Na, a lot of innocents thinking they were being edgy but really having no idea what edgy was. We were the greatest power in the world bar none (except the USSR, perhaps), and we had rock n roll, cool cars, and a fresh start. Ask your average baby boomer if they look back fondly on the 50s and they will likely smile vaguely and nod vigorously. So will you twenty years from now when asked about the 90s, kiddo. The past gets vague, and only the good stuff remains, unless of course your parents lock you in a closet and feed you live worms. But the 50s weren't so much better, either. There was an amazing amount of ignorance and complacency throughout the population, a lazy sort of acceptance that hid some very real tensions and division for a little while. While political paranoia made the land of the free the land of blacklists and fear, the racial divisions that haunt this country to this day were finally reaching the boiling point after decades of hateful policy and ignorant attitudes. Drug use in the country began to take on the common and widespread shape that it has had ever since, and women once again found themselves cast in tight, restrictive roles that limited their ability politically if not in actuality. The cold war was at its scariest (with the exception of the Cuban Missle Crisis) and the mushroom cloud seemed to loom everywhere. The fifties look cool in Back to the Future, but in reality they were just another age in american history, and they didn't have MTV, home computers, or diet Coke. I could go on and on. For every list of good things about a past decade, I can give a list just as long of things bad about it, and your end result would be: deadlock. Maybe you'd have things better in one sense (you could have sex without worrying about AIDS) but you'd have it worse in another (you couldn't find anyone to have sex with). AND really, what lies at the heart of a desire to live in another, "simpler" age? Fear, I suppose. We live in scary times and the one definite advantage to living in the past is you know everything thats going to happen. If you don't feel up to the challenge of living in the what may (or may not) be the most important, dangerous, and interesting time in US history, its an easy out to flash back to an age whose outcome is already decided and recorded. Let's face it, there has always been war and murder, rape and VD, sin and injustice. The difference is, in past times there wasn't indoor plumbing, vaccines, Mister Softee or Too Much Joy records. My advice to those of us who wish to live in the past is to stop whining about the sad state of modern life and start improving it, because if there is a price to pay for boldly embracing the future then I will pay it and move on. Some will argue that they do not flee from the pressures of a modern age, but rather feel themselves just better suited to a past time, in temperament or sensibilities, fashion sense or tastes. This sounds plausible, but I don't accept it. After all, we're all products of our upbringing, and we are shaped by the age we're reared in. The chances that you would be a totally different person if you'd been born in some other historical period are huge and looming, and if you think you've got a superior moral sense, or a desire for innocence, then its a sure bet that it was growing up in this day and age that gave it to you. We are shaped by the tiniest events and the mildest pressures into what we are today, remove even the smallest of influences and we would have been different people. Take away your entire cultural and historical context, and you might not be recognized, you would be so different. In short, if you rubbed a bottle and a genie granted your wish to be born in simpler times, the joke is you might emerge from those simpler times as someone who craved tragedy and complexity in their daily life, violence and strife. So, get used to it, piglets. Enjoy what we have and work against what you don't like, hell -even vote if you think it'll help. But don't read harlequin romances and wish to have been born in more heroic times, because you weren't and it's a waste of time, and admit it or not you are a product of these times and owe everything -including that desire for the past- to the modern day. If today is perverse and twisted, then so are you. And I for one am proud. ======================================== *** FICTION *** JUST AS BEFORE By Jeff Somers ======================================== "I forgive nothing. And I'm a liar." -Elvis Costello JUST like that, and I was awake. It was like the desert in my car, stiff and still and hot enough to kill. I was lying in a sweat across the front seat, cramped and breathless. I sat up and banged my head against the car roof, frowning and wondering where my new headache came from: the heat, the booze, or the smack to the head. A policeman, ensconced in a blaze of too-bright sunshine, was peering at me from behind mirrored sunglasses. I peered back at him, carefully, trying to remember how I looked without checking. He rapped on the window again, sharply. I leaned across with a groan and several alarming pops from my back. By the time I got the window down, I was out of breath and wishing for a cigarette. "You can't sleep here, sir." I grinned at him, he blinked in sudden apprehension, his face distorted by unaccustomed fear and doubt. "Where," I asked in a voice bent by ruinous congestion, "exactly is 'here'?, officer?" "The highway," he snapped, eager to be away from me and my wrinkled clothes. "You can't just pull over anywhere and sleep." "You'd prefer I fall asleep while driving?" "I'd prefer you find lodging fot the night sir." he said. "Now get your vehicle off the shoulder, please." "Okay, officer." I watched him stalk off and then managed to straighten up. Nausea welled up and then faded back, then welled up again. Slowly, so as not to break my brittle and careless bones, I set about unrolling all of the windows, letting my poor sweat and exhalations drain away, clearing the air. I sucked in oxygen and felt marginally better. In the rear-view mirror my hair was a mess and I had angry crease marks across my face. I remembered suddenly that I had no cigarettes, that Tess had all the cigarettes, and I wasn't about to open the trunk to get them, not even after Dudley Do-right was gone. I had a plan, after all, and just had to keep my head until I'd explained myself. Not everyone in Pirelli's was happy to see me, the usual bunch of love birds and fools, just as I'd left them a few days ago. I knew they'd be there; they never went anywhere else. Thin coatings of dust had settled on them, giving their hair a greyed look, their clothes a used look. No one shouted my name in obvious delight. They just paused, looked away, and watched me out of the corners of their eyes. Mary, naturally, was the only one to come to my defense, gliding up with a look of mild horror on her face. "Christ Phil, you look like shit." I grinned. "A witty man would say that was an insult to shit everywhere." "Where's Tess?" "Can we sit down?" Mary wasn't used to being ignored. I would venture that no one had ever ignored Mary for any extended period of time in her whole life. She was obviously scared, though, and I suppose I couldn't blame her, really. I'd be scared, too, if I didn't know what I'd been up to. As a matter of fact, I was scared anyway, for different reasons. She led me to a booth where a worried-looking cup of coffee sat alone and cold on the table, a forgotten cigarette drifting upward on its own warm wind in the ashtray. There was just enough sun to blind you, not enough to take the chill out of your bones or to tan your skin. She sat down, pale and cold, and I paused to push fingers through my stiff hair before squeezing in across from her. All the other clowns were watching us. I tried to appear nonchalant, but I wanted to scream. "We're worried." she said. "Give me a cigarette." I said. While she paused to figure whether I was being rude or not, I looked around. I'd been in Pirelli's a million times ever since I'd been sixteen. It never looked so shitty, in all those years. "Here." I took the proffered cigarette and looked her in the eye as she lit it for me. Mary would take shit until it came out of her ears, if she wanted something from you. It was what I liked about her, sometimes. "Where's Tess?" I leaned forward and felt the smoke tickle my lungs. I let it out and took her hand, luxuriously. It was cold, and soft, so delicate. The fingernails were neat and polished, like precious stones. "Mare, let me tell you a story." I ashed on the table and studied the coal of my cigarette, waiting for her to interrupt me. She didn't. After a moment I nodded and looked up; she was still watching me. I traced a fingertip along the curve of her wrist. "Once upon a time," I said, "there was a girl, whom no one liked. No one liked her because she was mean, and bratty, and self-centered. She played mean jokes on her friends, and used people, and was generally a bitch." She yanked her hand away before I could stop her. "Oh shut the fuck up." she hissed. I reached out and grabbed her hand again, holding it tight and pulling her close to me. "And one day," I continued cruelly, "she met a man, a nice guy and he thought maybe she was misunderstood, maybe she just needed to be trusted." "Fuck, Phil, you're hurting me!" "But he was wrong. She really was a mean, rotten bitch who didn't like anyone, and she treated him with contempt just because he liked her. She taunted him, she teased him, she hurt him for fun." "Let me go!" She knew who I was talking about, and she didn't like where it was headed. I let her go, and she fell back against the seat sharply, letting out a little yelp. I leaned back and watched her rubbing her arm. I sucked in smoke and let her cold stare chill me. "Where is she?" I smiled. "She'll always be in our hearts, Mary." There was a pretty little moment of empty quiet as shock paralyzed her, I guess. Then, with a snarl and a gurgling noise from deep within, she reared back and hit me flat across the face, full force and with extreme predjudice. Lights flashed, and my face was on fire. She was standing over me. "You're a pig, you're a fucking asshole, Phil." Amazingly, there were tears in her eyes. "If you hurt her, you fucking monster, if you fucking did anything, I'll fucking kill you!" She was shouting, and we were attracting a slim crowd of my closest friends. Hands sprouted on her shoulders; she shook them off. I laid my head in my hand and grinned up at her. "Where is she!?" she yelled. "Where's my sister!! GODDAMMIT, SAY SOMETHING!!" I shrugged, still smiling. I couldn't stop. "She's in the trunk." She snarled again, she lunged at me, and if not for the people holding her back she would have had my throat. They dragged her away; I could hear her, still, faintly from across the diner. Without warning, Tom Marbly sat down across from me. I sucked smoke, listening to the dry crackle of burning tobacco, and watched him, the familiar sag of a face I'd known longer than anything, the usual crags and shadows. Tommy regarded me with a somber expression, something between pity and anger that made me want to laugh. I looked at the deep scar I'd given him almost twelve years ago, and ugly pink welt just below his eye, shiny and taut, the mark I'd left on him. "That wasn't funny, Phil." he admonished. I thrust out a hand. "Tommy, how have you been? Better than me, I'd wager." "Phil - " "I ever tell you about Fat Billy?" "What?" I dove right in, I didn't give him a chance to even think. "We had a party once, back in school. You remember that house we rented in Senior year? We had a couple of monstrous parties, you know, like 500 people at a time. It got chaotic sometimes." "Goddammit, Phil - " "So we had one a few years back," I plunged on, louder, making him sit back and regard me with a cool stare. I suppose it was supposed to intimidate me. "And it's like, about three in the morning, and the only ones left are the pissed-off, bitter fucks like me and all the shits who don't care when the party ends because hell, it isn't their house, is it? Right. So the King Shit was this guy Fat Billy, this pale red-head, looks to be about 300 pounds, always wore this biker jacket. Well, I don't know who invited him, if anyone did, but at 3 in the fucking morning he hunkers down on his grossly huge haunches and cranks up the stereo, to about twelve." I paused to snuff out my cigarette, and he just stared at me. "He finds some punk song on the radio, and he jumps up and he starts to fucking mosh all by himself in my living room! I mean, I had this fucking freak leaping around with his arms out, beet red and sweating like a pig. Man you could feel the fucking house shake like it was made of balsawood or something." "Look, goddammit, is there - " I pounded my fist on the table top, making everything dance. "You haven't heard the fucking kicker yet, Tom." He stared at me, his eyes all narrow. "Fine, Phil, what's the fucking kicker, eh?" I leaned forward and grinned as wide as I possibly could. "Here's the kicker: just as I'm about to knock this shithead down and pull the plug - he might weight a ton, but he moved like a fucking elephant and I wasn't afraid of him - he fucking leaps up, he fucking goes airborne, and smashes into the chandelier." I lit a new cigarette. Tommy didn't say anything. "I was amazed. I mean, I just couldn't do the fucking math, you know? It's like the Bumble-Bee -there's no fucking way something that big goes goddam airborne. It breaks the laws of physics. No way. I mean, it almost makes me believe in magic." There was no music in the diner. We sat facing each other and there was nothing in the background, not even Mary, who had faded away. Tommy gave me a few heartbeats and then he leaned forward, settling up on his elbows. "You done?" My grin came back again, with a life of its own. "Yeah, I'm done." "Then take this down, jerkoff." He tapped a finger on the table and I leaned back to smoke and listen. "Where is Tess? And you'd better fucking say something or I will beat the shit out of you. You treat her like total shit, you have the fucking balls to hit her in front of everybody, and then you both disappear for two days." He sat back. "Tell me what's going on." I caught sight of pink and white and raised my deadened arm. "Coffee, please." "Phil - " Tommy grunted dangerously. I held up a hand, dragging smoke into myself leisurely, slowly. "Tom," I said, "when I first saw her, I could feel my life passing by. I could feel what I had been missing, and I thought: I'd rather die than not know her." I flicked my eyes to him, and caught him looking almost human. "It suddenly seemed like everything else had just been preparation for this. You realize, at a certain point, I think, that all this heedless nihilism is just a way to pass the time until something real comes to you, like the unexpected way her eyebrow arches, or the curve of her lip." I rubbed one eye with a thumb. "Christ, Tom. It took me four or five hours to fall in love with her. Everything paled in comparison. I suddenly looked around and wondered what I'd been up to these decades of late, what could I possibly have found important without her?" He was staring at me again, he wasn't getting any of it, he was just waiting to yell at me again. My coffee came, dark and bitter and slopped all over the saucer. I began feeding sugar into it, up on my elbows for one last try. "Do you know how much I loved her, Tom? You got any idea at all? I felt things fall into place I didn't even know were floating free. Everything clicked. "And she used it. Like a tool, or a toy, she grasped it in her greasy hands and used it." "Oh, fuck you." Tom hissed the moment I'd stopped. "Shut the fuck up and just tell me where you guys went, where she is, and if we ought to hate you for it." "Oh, you'll hate me." I agreed. Then I stood up. "C'mon. I want to show you something." "What?" I leaned down. "I'd like to take a walk and show you something, Tommy. Feel free to join me." "You cocksucking -" I turned away. I could hear him struggling out of the booth behind me. "Okay, okay, you son of a bitch." "Some would say ," I called out over my shoulders, "that that was an insult to SOB's everywhere! Don't forget the tip." It was the first cup of coffee anyone had bought me in a long time, and for a brief, heady moment I felt normal again, a part of the waking world. I waited outside for Tom as he haggled with our formerly mutual friends. It was cold and shivery, damp and grim, hot and dry all at once. The sun hurt my eyes. "Okay, what?" Tommy hovered next to me. Up until a few days ago, me and him had been friends. I started to walk, and he followed. "You're fucking crazy." he muttered. I ignored it. It didn't matter anyway, not really. "Yesterday, Tommy," I said wearily, "I spent yesterday wishing none of this had happened. I wanted everything to be just as it was, before. I wanted to go back in time and not do a few things, go ahead and do a few things. Put everything right, put it back the way it was. I wasted yesterday, Tommy. I sat around wishing it could all be the way it was. Now I know you can only go forward, you can only move on. If you want things to be the way they were, you have to make it happen." We reached my car, and I put my hands on the trunk, leaning on the cars usual weight. I paused a moment, feeling the air against my face. "Well?" Tommy snapped. I leapt back, fishing my keys from my pocket. "Tommy," I said, fitting the key into the lock, "Tommy, we were friends once." Remarkably, he put a hand on my shoulder and seemed to take a deep breath. "Phil, we're still friends." I fought an urge to giggle. "Are we?" "You're just testing my patience." We stood for a moment, watching each other, and then I nodded. I had a little faith left. I turned the key and let the trunk pop open. "That's how much I loved her." He glanced down, and I closed my eyes, breathing and waiting, curious. ======================================== *** RAGE-FILLED IDIOCY *** KAREN ACCAVALLO'S BOOK OF LISTS as if anyone cared by Karen Accavallo, authority ======================================== ---- THINGS I LOVE by Karen Accavallo, authority ---- Now Jeff would like to have everyone believe that not only am I hated by all, but that I in fact hate all. Lies! Here for you now is a list of things I love. 1. Ridiculing those less fortunate than me. Both of them. 2. My apartment. I didn't know that my Saturday nights out of the nest would be occupied by snaking the toilet. 3. Writing for the Inner Swine. If only Jeff wouldn't spring it on me at the last minute. 4. My job. I'm due for a raise soon. 5. The Boys. So we're going to go 7 and 9 this season, and all our starters are in jail. Love means never having to say you're sorry. 6. Eric Clapton. And don't say anything about it. He's got chunks of guys like you in his stool.* 7. Sun-dried tomatoes. Could eat them by the truckload, and have. 8. When I have to go the bathroom and there's none for miles. Just ask my travel buddies. 9. Your basic half and half. Actually I put that in here because I just found out what it means. 10. Dino-rock. Can anything beat the Allman Brothers after a bottle of Thunderbird at 2 am? 11. Telling little kids that they have to fight the bear. No explanation necessary. 12. Chaos and disarray. 13. Choco-Bliss and Suzy Q's. They're not just for breakfast anymore. 14. When I stay awake on the bus. 15. Gerry Cooney. 16. Hercules. While I am offended that Xena the Warrior Princess has to fight dragons and bad mguys in a metal push-up bra, I don't mind getting a glimpse of that guy's pecs every now and again. 17. Oatmeal. I had no idea it was so versatile. 18. Painful Rectal Itch. Ok, not really. I'm grasping, here. It's six o clock and this weirdo in the office keeps walking by and looking at me. 19. Cheese. 20. My boss. Did I mention I'm due for a raise?** ---- THE DEFINITIVE LIST OF ALL OF JEFF'S FAULTS ---- 1. He is dead-set against the institution of marriage, but refers to his vast collection of pornography as his "wife." 2. He can't go to the bathroom without getting his suspenders wet. 3.He smells funny. 4. He insists on cutting out the buttocks of all his pants. 5. Have you ever seen him eat? 6. He sometimes calls his Automated Masturbatory Device (AMD) "Mommy." 7. He can't get on public transportation without explosives taped to his chest.. 8. He's always gotta tear ya down, never can he lift ya up. 9. He fills me with rage by maligning things I love. (see list) 10. He's gassy. 11. He removes his beard with Nair. 12. He called me a freak once. 13. He can't spell. 14. He doesn't have any grasp on good grammar.*** 15. I practically have to do his job for him. 16. I'm not even going to mention his car. 17. He'll deny this, but I know I have seen him, clad in a loin cloth lurking outside my building. 18. Should I mention the poster of one big breast hanging on his wall? 19. Three words: Dirty Boy Things. 20. Oh, just look at him, for God's sake. ---- THINGS THAT FILL ME WITH RAGE ---- 1. People who plow to the front of my bus as soon as we exit the Lincoln Tunnel. Where exactly do they think they're going? 2. Women who trap me in the ladies' room with inane conversation. Example: Miscellaneous co-worker freak: "Do you find the water in the bathroom cleans your glasses better than the water in the kitchen?" Me: notice there is no response as I have passed out 3. People who hang up on my answering machine. What's the matter? Don't like ABBA? 4. ABBA 5. The fact that my car insurance is going up 500 bucks a year because some inbred hick slammed into me, and OJ walks free. 6. The fact that now I must admit I'm approaching 30 and my only male companionship is my super who thinks I clog my toilet on purpose just to get him up there. ---- THINGS THAT HAVE CLOGGED MY TOILET by Karen Accavallo, authority. ---- A canned ham, 80 years of mineral deposits, several tubes of lipsticks that have accidentally fallen in, jeff's hand, back-shavings, some old pea soup I didn't know what to do with, rage, a family of bald eagles, my "experiments", the stuff I bleach, my arm hair with, my arm hair, the ennui that is my life. 7. That the male-dress never really caught on 8. The thought that I am the only one in America who realizes that Bob Dole is 73 years old. 9. The guy in Wendy's who actually thought I was ordering three meals for myself. 10. Men who call me Blondie. I would much rather be called Mama. 11. Wilford Brimley. 12. The elimination of the instant replay. 13. ZZ Top's "LaGrange." 14. ZZ top. 15. Navel hair. 16. The fact that my salary rivals public relief. 17. I must always play second fiddle to Jeff's female harem and collection of pornography.**** 18. Good and Plenty's . The bar and the candy. 19. The blue fuzz behind my toilet. 20. Most of my friend's boyfriends. EDITOR'S NOTES: * Eric Clapton certainly is at that venerable age when chec king your stool might be a wise precaution, especially after a life of drug use, groupie use, and synthesizer use (God, indeed). ** Karen's brown-nosing offends and amuses the editor, but he leaves it in in order to court the appearnace of objectivity and fairness. *** Grammar is in the eye of the beholder. Someone without art in her soul might miss the nuances that the term "poetic license" was invented to excuse. Karen is something of a grammar nazi, goose-stepping through life with her "rules". **** Karen has been invited to join the harem many times, but refuses to undergo the strenuous initiation rite. Don't worry, pigs, Karen is once again safely tucked away under professional care. We break her out once a month to write for us, sort of like B.A. Barracus from the "A-Team". ======================================== *** FICTION *** NO GREAT TRICK by Jeff Somers ======================================== "I have walked down train tracks Drunk at 3AM It's no great trick, it's not magic When the trains don't run til 6" - Too Much Joy ---- 1. Black Magic ---- It was about the time that Norm Cashman began practicing black magic in his little closet of an office that I met Debbie, the most unihibited receptionist to ever refuse to sleep with me in a long and proud tradition of women refusing to sleep with me. I can remember the time exactly because Norm caused quite a ruckus before he got fired, what with the dead chickens and the black smoke leaking from under his door. It was during a fire drill caused by one of his spells gone awry (involving, from the smell, burning animal fat) that I met her, a tall brunette in her thirties who turned to me in the chill of an early morning and began saying some of the filthiest things I'd ever heard uttered. I was delighted, of course. I stood next to her for fifteen minutes with a grin on my face the size of my erection and wondered if this was the universe's way of paying me back for all that acne back in high school. It wasn't. Although of course I asked her out (34 times to date) she has never so much as shared a cup of coffee with me. She will freely and gladly describe sexual acts and concepts I had until-then thought arcane and possibly myhtical, she will gab on and on about all manner of kinks and fetishes and apparatus until I am red-faced and incoherent, but she only smiles slightly and shakes her head when I beg to buy her dinner, gifts, mansions, whatever. I have grown to hate her, in a way, so I call her twice a day. I was on the phone with her (being put on hold every few minutes so she could answer the other lines and do her job), amazed at how smoothly she could go from "Good morning, Denton Incorporated" to a lengthy discussion of the tru meaning of the phrase "ribbed for her pleasure" without any signs of transition, when Norm finally got canned. He'd been chanting in his office all morning, casting some mighty incantation we were all ignoring more or less by habit, when they came. They being Mark Fillmore, Human Resources Director, and Phyllis Gumber, Director of Outside Sales, Norm's boss. Apart, they were just about the ugliest two human beings I had ever seen. Together, however, their ugliness sort of canceled itself out, leaving them moderately blurred and possibly bland. We all knew Norm was getting canned, and we just kept talking on the phones and tapping our computers as if we'd seen dozens of forced departures, which, of course, we had. Norm, however, wasn't ready yet. As they entered his office he let out a cry and there was some sort of purple flash (I only saw it out of the corner of my eye and my mind was occupied with Debbie's descriptions of the sensual properties of latex) and the door slammed. Then, nothing for about a minute, as Debbie moaned on into my ear about rubber. When the door opened, Norm was preceded by a thick cloud of smoke, and then he ran into the maze of cubicles yelling "I'm invisible! I'm invisible!" while most of us just stared and held down anything we didn't want him grabbing up in his frenzy. He dashed around the cubes for a while despite the fact that no one was chasing him, and then disappeared into the halls. I glanced over at Phil Dublen, and our eyes met. Silently, we said to each other "Who gets his office?" They eventually found Norm's clothes down on the 17th floor, but as far as I know they never found Norm that day. Of course, once they were sure he had left the building, they stopped looking. ---- 2. Corporate Advancement ---- We were back at work within twenty minutes. Phyllis and Mark emerged from Norm's office pale and choking from the smoke, and they wandered around us for a while, dazed. Phyllis kept sitting in people's guest chairs and staring at them plaintively, saying "My goodness, the smoke." to us whenever we made the mistake of making eye contact. Mark Fillmore went back to his office, opened the lower right drawer he kept a bottle of whiskey in, found three live rats squirming around in it, and had a heart attack on the spot. The rats escaped into the building and have wreaked more havoc than Norm Cashman could ever hope to. Mark had closed his office door behind him, and no one realized he was dead until the cleaning ladies complained about having to move him in order to get to the waste-paper basket. Phyllis was never quite the same, and took to wandering the floor with empty cups of coffee clutched in her hands, muttering. At meetings she would peer fearfully at us as if we were making lewd gestures at her, and her fear of Norm's office took on the proportions of dementia. When Phil was moved into it she refused to speak to him, and would leave rooms when he entered. Privately, she said she could smell the office on him. Phil's only complaint was that he still found chicken feathers in the oddest places. Two weeks after Norm's exciting departure I was once again on the phone with Debbie, who was panting about the many uncommon uses of excercise equipment, when Phyllis tendered her resignation. Actually, what she did was march into the midst of us and inform us that a) the whole building was cursed, b) we ought to all get out if we valued our souls, and c) she was still going to find out who had been eating her yogurt and have her revenge. On that note she turned and left. I put Debbie on hold and called Phil. "Who do you suppose is getting her job?" we wondered. "They won't promote from within." Phil assured me. I took comfort in that and went back to Debbie, who was still moaning about the Thighmaster as if she hadn't realized I'd put her on hold. Or cared. When Phil got Phyllis' job I was momentarily suspicious and angered, but when he promoted me to his old position and I got the old Cashman office (as it had come to be known) I was mollified, and bought him drinks. Sozzled, he told me he'd been sleeping with Debbie for almost three months and that every word she said was sweetly true, and I hated him again. ---- 3. Food Politics and the Open Door Policy ---- A week after I'd moved into my new office someone actually grew disgusted enough to clean out the ancient and ignored fridge in our little employee kitchen, and a human heart in a pickle jar was discovered and brought to me because it had Norm Cashman's name on it. We had taken to printing our names on our food so no one would take anyone elses lunch by mistake. This policy had not, of course, stopped lunch theft, but at least we were comforted by the knowledge that it was no longer accidental. Upon closer inspection the heart was revealed to have a long darning needle thrust through it.I put it up on my book shelf and found myself staring at it, constantly. This eventually made me notice that the darning needle had a label on it, and the label read "Mark Fillmore". This did not stop me from staring at the heart, but it did cause me to keep my door shut as I did so. Not too long afterwards, a memo from Phil Dublen arrived asking me to keep my office door open at all times, because it being closed constantly was causing a great deal of gossip amongst the other employees. As I sat reading this memo, my phone rang, and it was Phil. "You see guy, " he began, "you see, you're in Cashman's old office." "Yes." "And, er, we all know how he went out!" "Right." Phil was giving me a strong impression that I ought to have gotten his point by then. "Um, if you keep your door closed, people are afraid you'll start doing the same...odd...things." There was a note of triumph in his voice, he clearly thought he's put it so plainly even I could grasp the jist. I studied the mottled and mishapen heart on my shelf and ideas began to come to me. "Of course, Phil." I said tonelessly. "I've got to go, Deb's on the other line." "I understand." he said wolfishly, and hung up. ---- 4. The Phone Bill and The New Math ---- These days, Debbie saying anything was enough to increase my pulse; reciting the phone book would at least keep me interested. Still, I'd stopped calling her because I was a) afraid of my increasing need for her soothing voice and b) afraid to open my phone bill, which had arrived in several envelopes and sat heavily on my desk at home, bloated and out of all proportion. It had taken over my apartment, because no matter where I put it, it radiated an evil demand for funds and I became afraid to enter any room it was in. I had tried hiding it in a drawer and I still thrashed about nervously, feeling its single red eye calling to me. I hadn't opened it, of course. I'd weighed it carefully in my hands and tried to intuit a number, and when the number had come to me I'd dropped it onto the kitchen floor with a yelp. I considered wrapping it up and burying it, claiming I'd never seen it, but now a new and troubling thought had entered my mind. No matter what I did with this phone bill, there was bound to be another one. I started leaving my door open to keep everyone happy; immediately people began popping their heads in to see if I'd done anything batty while I'd been hidden. It was about this time that I stopped answering my phone, because Debbie had begun to phone-stalk me, and I knew that if I spoke to her once I would not be able to resist and my phone bill would grow to such incredible proportions that folk singers years from now would write songs about it, and the kids of their time would scoff and mock them in disbelief. I was seized by an urge to shut my door, to spit in their eyes, the bunch of narrow-minded witch-hunters, to do exactly what I wasn't supposed to do. Whenever I closed my door, though, Phil would call me almost immediately and leave voice-mail messages, some ten minutes long, concerned mostly with rumor-mongering and its adverse effect on any corporation. In my opinion, Phil had gone corporate on me. Finally, it was all too much, and one day I tore my eyes from Mark Fillmore's heart, stood up, and slammed my door hard enough to startle everyone in the cubes. The phone began to ring immediately, and when I turned, determined to pick it up, Norm Cashman was sitting at my desk. There are three moments in my life I consider to be unreal and clearly hallucinatory. The first occurred when I was seven and involved a fever dream wherein I raced my bed around the room, defeating several other beds. The second happened in college and involved a lot of beer, unfiltered cigarettes, and, unfortunately, vomit. The third was Norm Cashman grinning at me from behind my desk. The phone stopped ringing, and immediately someone was pounding on my door. Norm just grinned at me, and he didn't disappear when I opened the door to let Phil yell at me; my employment was conditional on keeping my office door opened. I could see people grinning at their desks behind Phil, and I thought of Mark Fillmore's heart. When Phil left me I was afraid that it might have started beating, but it was still as ever, and Norm Cashman just kept grinning at me. ---- 5. The War of the Rats ---- It was right around then that the rats emerged from our air ducts and began their fight to take over the floor. My war with Phil Dublen over my open office door had just started to heat up; he found a hundred excuses every day to wander by and make sure I was exposed to all the idiots who worked with me, and I made it my habit to be grinning at him every time he wandered by. I had Harriet who had a cubical not far away call me every time Phil emerged from his office, and he always found me grinning at him happily. The first rat was something of a celebrity: he was fat and waddled and made Jenny from accounting tear her skirt clean off in her frenzied attempt to escape it once it emerged in her office, apparently from nowhere. Barry the Weird Guy who knew all the computers caught it and delighted himself (and a few of the rest of us, secrets be known) by chasing Jenny around with it for a few minutes. This moment of good clean american fun was interrupted by the arrival of the rest of the rats, at least a dozen of them, which made an animalistic beeline for Barry, in what appeared to all present to be a rescue mission for their imprisoned, and presumably tortured, fellow. I will champion equal rights for animals everywhere, especially if I get to witness the rather unlikely gymnastics Barry afforded us that afternoon, tossing his prisoner aside and leaping atheletically onto Jim Nueson's desk. The rats promptly disappeared, leaving Jenny weeping and skirtless on one end of the office and Barry quivering over an annoyed Jim Nueson on the other. Through an odd absence of pest control, the rats made sudden and often dramatic appearances for the next several months, all through the lawsuit Jenny brought against the company and Barry. Barry took it all cheerfully; he'd been one of the office weirdos before, and he continued to be one of the office weirdos. He had lost no status in the episode, and if one can assume that he took some pride in being the office weirdo (a possiblity I had never before considered but which seemed suddenly probable) one can then also assume that the whole episode had only increased his prowess as a weirdo, that weirdos everywhere had heard of his stunt and were passing along quiet accolades. I myself passed along a quiet note of appreciation when I ran into him in the kitchen, where he was busy eating someones lunch. I had made it back to my office before realizing he'd been eating my lunch. I realized this, however, just as I opened one of my desk drawers to discover a rat, apparently enjoying an afternoon snooze. We regarded each other for a moment, calmly, and then I slowly slid the drawer closed again. I sat in my office the rest of the day, staring at Mark Fillmore's heart. Jenny returned to the office some weeks later, winner of her lawsuit and secure with a court order to the company not to take any vengeful action against her. The company didn't. The rats, however, did, appearing magically whenever Jenny might find herself alone and vulnerable. She managed to kill several of them, emerging from copy rooms and conference rooms bloody and rattled, breathless and with a somewhat wild look in her eyes, dead rats clutched like trophies in her hands. Jenny became something of an unpopular lunch date shortly after her first few rat conquests, and seeing as the little beasts semed to follow her around exclusively, no one really wanted to spend much time with her in the office, either. Her last act before resigning, bless her heart, was to force the company to hire an exterminator to rid the place of pests. ---- 6. Norm Cashman and Petty Theft ---- The moment she stumbled into the elevator with a box of her personal possessions under one arm, however, the rats patently disappeared. Even the little one in my drawer which I'd been feeding Barry's lunch to on the sly was gone when I inspected my desk. From that day on, none of us so much as saw a rat. A court order is a court order, however, and a week later the exterminator arrived, and I wasn't the least bit surprised, at this point, to discover that he was Norm Cashman. I was, however, surprised to realize that no one else seemed to notice this. Everyone regarded him with the usual polite disdain office workers reserve for the lower labors, people who have to wear uniforms and the lot. Norm grinned at me as he walked around clucking about traps and poisons and the rest, and I knew who he was, but no one else seemed to. By this time, of course, I simply shrugged my shoulders and hoped for the best. Norm began showing up as various menial laborers around the time someone in the office began stealing office supplies. Normally, supply larceny is expected and goes unnoticed, but the criminal mastermind who emerged amongst us took the concept to a new high, leaving the rest of us amused, amazed, and somewhat jealous. I can only assume some small business was being bankrolled from the proceeds. First, we arrived one monday morning to discover that all the paperclips had been removed from our desks, the supply closets and, in a bizarre twist I privately considered brilliant, from our files. Memos previously clipped together fluttered loose. An entire year's worth of sales reports melded together into one solid mass of unrelated numbers. The thought of someone actually taking the time to do this made me shiver in delight, it smacked of greatness. A few days later, all the phones were missing, prompting most of us to throw up our hands and head out to a bar called McGees to plot strategy, which of course meant that most of us were not in on the next day. I crawled in, nursing a hangover, only to discover that overnight the copiers had been stolen, along with Mark Fillmore's heart, though I said nothing of that to anyone. This finally prompted a stunned managerial team to take some action. The police were called, building security chastised, and new copiers ordered. For some reason no one thought to replace the phones, and once again everyone threw up their hands and trooped out to McGees for more plotting over beers. While we were out, the criminal mastermind crept back in to purloin every single tape gun in the mail room. Suspicion ran rampant, until I pointed out that everyone had taken at least one extended bathroom break while at the bar, thus giving everyone opportunity. It was not a popular observation. Luckily, this was when I noticed Norm Cashman beckoning me from a shadowy part of the bar. I crept over, cradling my beer, and sat down with him. Mark's heart sat obscenely on the table before him, and he was smoking a cigar happily. "Norm," I said, nodding. He nodded back, and told me, cannily, that I might want to save myself while it was still possible. I asked him, quite contritely, why he felt the need to curse the company, and ruin all our jobs. "Fuck your jobs." was his reply. And he patted the jar holding Mark Fillmore's heart ominously. The next day, all our chairs were gone, leaving everyone standing around chatting excitedly. I quietly cleaned out my desk (which contained more rat droppings than personal items) and tendered my resignation to Phil, who took it stoicly, chugging back booze at his own desk. Walking out, I found Norm working as one of the security guards. He waved at me happily, and I saluted him, and when I arrived home I was not surprised at all to learn that my apartment was filled with copy machines and chairs. ======================================== *** COMMENTARY *** Bachelorhood ad Infinitum: Thank God I Am Alone By Jeff Somers ======================================== "I'd rather clean every toilet bowl in Grand Central Station, with my tongue Than spend one more minute with you" -Weird Al Yankovic You get those pitying looks sometimes, you know the looks, usually from weepy Aunts or particularly romantic girls who haven't had their share of betrayal yet: poor guy, all alone. The assumption for anyone in this world on a solo ticket is that it must be intolerable for them, so sad, how depressing. Very few people ever stop to think that maybe it's by choice. Of course there are those of us singles who ruin it for everyone by constantly moaning about their situation. These people are obviously deluded: either their life is fine and they simply seek drama by bemaoning their sad singleness, or their lives are completely fucked up and they seek a simple explanation which does not in any way involve their own culpability. Deciding that the opposite sex has no taste and is populated by idiots, bitches, or assholes is much easier to swallow then realizing you've got no personality. Of course there are also the misery-lovers, those amongst us who might very well be attractive, interesting people with funny anecdotes and felxible sexual positions, but we'll never know, because they need to be spurned, so they can complain about it. Because these groups of people are so loud about their unhappiness, it's easy to think that everyone using the self-service pump in the gas station of life is depressed about it. I am here to tell you that it's not true. I guess I should stress here that I'm not talking about sex. I'd love to be having more sex. Hey, I'd love to be having sex, period. What I am saying here is that I do not wish to be involved in some ridiculously complex and deep relationship, that I am happy living and being alone. All the weepy young women and sentimental old hags out there are right now rolling their eyes at my brave front, but, dammit, it's true: I'd rather stick needles in my eyes than get "involved" right now, unless "involved" is defined as "cheap, loveless sex". Perhaps the male-bashers out there are salivating at such a blatantly male point of view. After all, we are just sex-seeking ciphers, filled with sports stats and semen, right? Women, delicate and sensitive, want emotional depth, tenderness, and commitment. Men want to hump anything in a skirt, right? I must laugh at such a simplistic world view: Ha Ha. The fact is, as I have discussed before, women are just as enthusiastic about sex as guys are, sometimes more so (sometimes to very scary levels) and I think that just as many women are relationship-phobic as men. Either that or I am much less charming in person that previously suspected, which, of course, isn't possible. The idea that by eschewing the partnered life I am somehow shallow is not only offensive, it's ridiculously dumb. It stems, I think, from the immense secret resentment that people involved in dull, boring relationships have towards those of us too smart to get sucked into it all. They are trapped and ruined, with only years and years of the same, years and years of the cluttered life to look forward to. Choosing to be involved in a romantic relationship has nothing to do with morals, which ought to be pretty obvious. And plenty of people (I've dated most of them) choose to be committed without really being ready for such a workload, and I think that not knowing what you're ready for or really want is about as shallow as it gets. The Bachelor life is fine for me, for several reasons. Number one, I don't have a bunch of insignificant holidays to keep track of. The day we met, three, six-month aniversaries, her entire familiy's birthdays, her birthday, her dog's birthday, her crappy new job - the list goes on, all the idiotic celebrations you have to remember, plan, and sit through when dating. I don't have any of them, and I often forget the ones I do have (like friend's birthdays, or Mom's) and no one can do anything about. Everybody in my life is denying me sex, it's not much of a threat. Number two, I don't have to mold or alter my life to fit some moronic pattern. I don't have to go jogging just because she jogs at night, I don't have to eat healthy or (gasp) vegetarian, I don't have to switch from briefs to boxers. In the sweat of passion you'll agree to anything, I see it every day. I am so glibly opinionated that the moment I start excercising just to please the little lady, my friends are gonna tear me apart. Number three, I don't have to worry about intergrating whoever I'm sleeping with into the clique. I have yet to meet anybody's girlfriend/boyfriend that I didn't dislike intensely, and I certainly would not want to have to worry about whether or not my crummy friends like my significant other. I have enough trouble summoning the energy to care what they think of me. ---- SIGNS THAT YOU ARE INDEED A BACHELOR ---- 1. You have mended clothing with the stapler 2. You have smelled laundry to see if it is wearable 3. Use the ironing board as an extra table 4. Don't know what an ironing board is 5. You have used any of the following as toilet paper in emergencies: a) newspaper, b) loose leaf paper, c) paper towels (and lived to regret it), d) leaves 6. You have rotten fruit, bottled water, salsa, and nothing else in your fridge 7. You have no fridge 8. You have never done the dishes, because you never bothered to buy dishes 9. You have never allowed your parents to see your apartment 10. You spend so little time at home you could be robbed blind and not know it for a week. The joys of bachelorhood: As a bachelor, you can spend hours trying to figure out what's in that plastic bag in the rear of the fridge is, trying to figure out why your tub won't drain, finding new ways of showering without soap. What you don't have to do is worry about when someone else will be done with the bathroom, or what you do when you suddenly find yourself wanting to sleep with their sister. You can sit around your living room in your underwear eating Captain Crunch and watching Mighty Mouse reruns (even in reruns the endings shock and amaze me) and not worry about anyone judging you. Resist the mindless lemming-like rush to couplehood, my friends, we bachelors and bachelorettes are a fast dying breed and must protect ourselves. Why do so many of us feel the need to justify our existence by merging with another personality? You are an individual, and the fact that you go through life alone does nothing to enhance or detract from your value or importance, so why this need to have someone call you "baby"? While I admit the existence of healthy relationships based on something other than desperate need and clinging desire for assurance, I don't admit many of them. Most people, I think, view the "serious" relationship as an icon, an objective, something they must achieve in order to be a real person. The battle cry for these poor souls is "How can that skag have a boyfriend/girlfriend, and not me?" This isn't a healthy approach to romance, kiddies. The dieal partnership, in this pig's eyes, is one reached from equal positions, wherein two cool people decide they like each other and decide to spend a lot of time together, not the co-dependent suckfest wherein the significant other could be anyone, as long as they fit a certain rather unromantic code of features. Committing to someone because you fell in love in spite of yourself seems cool, even to a slop-sucking pig such as myself. Committing to someone so you won't have to go to parties alone any more is crazy. Not even kidding. After all, if your life is so empty and listless that you require someone elses energy to make it worthwhile (like some sort of psychic vampire, using other peoples auras to complete your own existence) than what exactly are you offering the other side? What you'll end up with is one of those "caring nurturers" who is looking for a sad case such as yourself; in other words, a fellow incomplete person who needs to be needed in order to feel okay. The sort of person you call, weeping at 3:30am and they answer the phone immediately with "Hi. I've been waiting for your call." Zoiks! Nope, save yourselves the embarrassment and settle comfortably into your single life. Expand slowly to fill your apartment and revel in the fact that you're so cool, no one tells you what to do. Lick your spoons clean and put them back in the drawer. Utilize the One Load Theory of Laundry and feel good about your formerly white shirts turning pink. Go to bars and try and pick up cheap dates, just for fun. If we all just stayed single for a while instead of shooting out of the gate in search of matrimony and double beds, the world would be more fun, and there'd be more people to sleep with. Which, if I must be honest, was the real point of this entire article. ======================================== *** OUR WEEKLY DOSE OF FILLER *** She's so Beautiful, I Swear I'd Sleep with Her Brother Frustration as a Way of Life By Jeff Somers ======================================== The maxim "Simply by wanting it, it becomes impossible for me to have it" might sound a bit melodramatic, but it rules my life, along with several other maxims, including "Never tip waitresses who won't give you their phone numbers", "Never obey when someone thrusts their hand at you and say 'Hey, smell my hand'", the famous "I am not responsible for your good time", "I am under no obligation to make the world a better place", "Never eat at anyplace named "MOMS"" and "Don't get a job until you absolutely have to". I can have anything in the world, except the things I really want, and this is the sad story of my life, don't you know. My life is like playing with a Magic-8-Ball and getting "Answer Unclear" 131 times in a row. One my wonder how such a delicate and sensitive soul makes it through life without setting himself on fire, in the face of all this disappointment and rejection. The answer is simple: not only am I not in the least sensitive and delicate, but I would consider setting oneself on fire an unwise way of suicide. My goodness, the pain. And, perhaps, it might not be ridiculous to suppose that this very frustration is what drives me on in my life, what makes me continually heave myself out of my barcalounger and fuss with the various aspects of my existence. I would like to propose right now, to all the rest of you who feel like your lives are one big cesspool of frustration, that frustration is what keeps us all in motion. Satisfaction murders the spirit. The fact that satisfaction, or as some term it "happiness", is pretty much everybody's goal (not including, of course, all the crazies and misfits who have "killing someone famous" or "getting on Jeopardy" as goals) just pretty much proves my point. We scramble after happiness, fueled by frustration, and once we attain that state (or at least a state of contentment, which is not quite the same but which has the same tranquilizing affect) we slack off and stop bothering. Of course, after a lifetime of frustration many people reach a point where they slack off and stop bothering anyway, even without satisfaction, a silent collapse of the inner spirit resulting in a quiet exhalation of energy and a postscript marked by the eager intake of daytime talk shows ("Hello Sally, it's me again....") This is natural and pretty much all I have to look forward to, so there's nothing wrong with it. At least in defeat there is peace. Probably a good example of this spiritual cycle is your favorite rock star, or indeed, any artist you might pickl. Here are a group of people more driven by misery than any other (think about it: what other group of unhappy pricks gets off so completely on depression and futility?) and invariably when they reach their goals, when they get approval, money, and lucrative deals they lose their edge and become smiling has-beens, respected for their past works but ignored in favor of younger, angrier worker bees. Obviously there is a connection between your level of unhappiness and your level of ambition/success. Even for the rest of you, who lumber through your dull lives with excruciating staleness and painfully mundane goals (for want of a better word), there is a certain hunger that the uncertainty of youth and check-to-check living grants you. All of us, even the biggest baloon-head suburban idiot who thinks the Lexus in the driveway grants them some sort of grace, have a moment in our lives where we have some sort of potential for greatness, and usually it is granted to us by mild mannered desperation. So, Let's look at the career of Eric Clapton as an example: The man was obviously troubled as a youngster (you don't consume that much Smack in idle experimentation) and from this inner turmoil came some of the most famous rock guitar riffs in history (Layla, White Room, yadda yadda yadda). Somewhere around middle age when he was cashing a royalty check the size of venous, Eric somehow lost his edge and began pumping out the sort of dreck you'd expect to hear at a second rate Ramada Inn Lounge Act. What happened? Someone once took way too much acid and wrote in to Rolling Stone that they had done the math and there were no new combinations of musical notes left to write, in short that everything from that moment on would be a rip-off. Despite my personal liking of this theory, that isn't it: Eric simply got old and realized that he could pay his bills and do whatever the hell he wanted, which apparently was to screw 20 year old groupies and exude all the personality of a dead fish in videos and interviews. I don't fault Eric for this, but the arc is obvious and repeated endlessly, and not simply by rock musicians: novelists, painters, actors, directors, bankers, production editors, my neighbors, me, we all suffer from spiritual rot. Spiritual Rot, entropy in snack-size: You've heard of entropy, the theory that everything spins naturally back into chaos, that order is more or less an artificial imprint on the energies that run the universe. I love this theory, it gives me something to look forward to besides re-runs and beer. This applies not only to the awesome energies which spin the world and raise the sun, but to the minor sparks which keep us walking and crapping and rutting. One thing you can't deny is that we're going to die, which basically is the loss of energy until there just ain't enough to keep you grooving. Everything erodes, including the one thing about the human race no one has been able to figure out: our spirit, soul, subconscious, whatever you call it. That something inside our biology that makes us individuals. It gets tired, baby, it fails us and leaves us sitting in the Day Room wondering if they're gonna ever get around to cleaning your bedpan. The scary thing is, it can't be stopped. It can't. You have two possibilities, mis amigos: either you lose your edge or you die young, there really is no other way around it. Even if you never achieve any of your goals, there's no hope, that probably means you didn't have much juice to begin with and won't even notice the loss. And if you simply have been prevented from achieving your life's goals by cruel fate or painful failure, then you will most likely just get real tired and give up anyway. Entropy wins. It has to. You can see this in many small examples through your life; every time you say something like "I just don't have the energy (time, tolerance, sobriety) to do that any more" you've just witnessed entropy. Every time you expend some energy to gain on your goals, you lose an irreplaceable part of yourself. If you sat in a darkened room and mushroomed for seventy years and did absolutely nothing, not even wonder why you were sitting there, you might die in a supernova of potential, an almost-tangible release of pent-up energy. The rest of us just wheeze into a tired acceptance. Which, naturally, leads us to the oftimes-elusive and always obscure point of this article: if we are all doomed by entropy to eventual withering and faded powers, why bother? A good question, and I'm not surprised you didn't think of it yourself. If your reward for success is a heady welcoming of the release from pain you can only find in death, then what is the point? Well, I say that there is no point to this whole crazy process of living, I've been saying that since I was old enough to develope a smoker's cough. Your intellectual decline is inevitable, folks, the most you can do is trace your downfall into indolence and ennui. How to tell when your descent into indolence and ennui has begun: 1. Commercials become entertaining and fascinating; you find yourself saying You know, that Taster's Choice spot has some damned good writing! 2. You actually know what's on television at any given time, and find yourself saying things like Well, honey, it's 3AM on Sunday night, you wanna watch Gilligan? 3. You wake up drunk more than once a year. 4. You find yourself wondering about issues such as Are Cheez-Its a food group in themselves or Can you really dry clothing in the microwave 5. Violence to innocent people becomes amusing to you, as a concept. 6. You begin to look forward to telemarketing cold-calls: No, I'm not interested in buying a Salad Shooter, but by the way, what's your name? 7. Scanning the obituaries gives you a sense of warm well-being. 8. You're still reading this inane article. Or, perhaps, you can keep frustration as your ally, stay angry, never get happy, and continue on, possibly infinitely. Maybe the secret to immortality is simply to stay pissed off and unhappy, to allow fulfillment and satisfaction to elude you, to keep yourself grimly empty and striving, filled with rage. Perhaps the secret to eternal life is, in the words of Twisted Sister, to Stay Hungry (a great album when you're 13). If success robs us of ambition and drive, thwart success with laziness and sloth. If achievement robs us of energy and purpose, defeat the spectre of achievement by cultivating failure. In short, you might live forever if only you could stay miserably unfulfilled, which is not to say simply remain miserable: misery is mankind's natural legacy, after all. No, the secret is to remain miserably unfulfilled, a slightly different concept. Of course, living forever isn't what it's cracked up to be, especially if the only way to do it is to remain eternally frustrated. Also, immortality brings up all sorts of other possibilities: what if you get some horrible disease and lose limbs? What if you get blinded? Sure, you live to be 500 years old, but if 350 of them are spent begging on the streets of New York City in a wheelchair that was 25 years old when you got it from medicaid, is it worth it? And once you're in that situation, there's no way you'll ever get satisfaction, even if you decide you want it. You'll never be happy in that circumstance, and thus doomed to eternal suffering. Take it from me, achieve your goals and die peacefully, like a good shaved house monkey. So there you have it: Frustration as a way of life. No matter what else you might do, everyone is slated for a little bit of frustration in their lives, might as well open wide and suck it up until you see your way through the brush. Of course, you can buy satisfaction from The Inner Swine at discount prices, but it takes 6-8 weeks for delivery. Other great things about Twisted Sister 1. They broke up in 1992 2. They remade "Leader of the Pack" from a male point of view. 3. There is no chance they will ever reunite, despite the fact that lead singer Dee Snyder is working in 3rd rate bands on the small club circuit and the rhythm guitarist is, I hear, delivering pizzas on the west coast. 4. They introduced the poetic phrase "Play it loud, Mutha." in their album liner notes, where it quickly caught the imagination of a nation. ======================================== *** FICTION *** From My Youth, and Before by Jeff Somers ======================================== It was the fifth funeral in as many months, and while the whole cursed family were dropping like flies I was enjoying myself immensely. I was on my fifth beer and second sandwich, Connie was still crying in the kitchen, and three Uncles were still due, each with a cache of cousins swearing their condolences. I sat down next to Annie in the living room and grinned, feeling ghoulish. Every time the conversation waned we could hear Aunt Connie wailing in the next room. It inspired us to incredible conversational efforts. Dan had a pack of cigarettes and passed it around; I took one even though they were menthols. Annie moved over to me so I could give her a light, and she lay down with her head in my lap so she could blow smoke in my face. We talked about anything, we just maintained chatter in desperation. We were all staying over for the next two days in Aunt May's immense mausoleum of a house, and we were all thinking the same thing: if we had to listen to Connie bawling the whole time we'd like as not end up dead ourselves. First, Granny had keeled over, which had been sad, but she'd been 98 years old and there had been no reason for her to live that long anyway, so Dan and Annie and Paul and me had spent the week drinking and discussing love, sex, and the price of cigarettes. Then, Uncle Sam who had only been married to Aunt Nora for two years and whom no one had spoken to in decades. Annie and I had spent the whole wake shivering outside so we could smoke. Then our cousin Max, who was as old as our Aunts and Uncles and considered by us one of them, too old by far to be interesting. We'd all been hungover at his funeral service, which had been grim and rainy as a result. Only three weeks ago Aunt Sylvia had fallen down the stairs and lain there for three days before being found. Dan and I had been curious as to what the corpse would look like after drying out for 72 hours prior to embalming, but it had been closed-casket. Our topic of conversation had gotten us all into trouble; Uncle Jimmy had started calling the whole lot of us "The Ghouls". And now Terrance, whom none of us could recall with any accuracy. Aunt May's house was becoming familiar again, it no longer seemed like we were staying at the world's cheapest hotel. It boasted three floors with a labyrinth of rooms on each, most of which were eerily furnished but unused, dusty and yet neat. It was also packed with ancient and bizarre things, each room overflowing with bric-a-brac, paintings, and small pieces of art set out on elegant but elderly furniture. In our idle moments we cousins argued over who would inherit the place, but Aunt May was only 63 and showed little inclination to die any time soon. That led us to wonder if there would be any room for people at all when she finally did die, or if the place would be so thickly packed with junk we would have to dig for a week just to exhume the body. Such thoughts, however, made us unpopular, and we were on our best behavior after the closed-casket debacle. No bars, no going out, we were going to hang out in Aunt May's house and mourn if it killed us. Listening to Connie wail, I wasn't sure it wouldn't. Despite our handicaps, we were all pretty far zozzled on someone's beer and Danny's cigarettes. Annie was becoming far too pleasant as she dozed against me. If I looked I could see down her cleavage, so I kept my eyes studiedly on my cigarette. My mother walked in, and I pretended to be asleep until she left. I had nothing against Mom, she'd been feeding me for free as far back as I could remember and showed no signs of stopping yet. But I knew that she was trying to get me to act responsibly, to help out with stuff, and I would prefer to act catatonic all day than get involved with the funeral giddiness going on around me. My family came alive around death. It made me wonder. Annie wanted to go for a walk after that, to clear her head, so we creaked through the hall, thin jackets in hand. It was chill and windy out, smelling of rain, but we went out anyway. When Annie decided something, it was often advisable to grin and pretend to enjoy it. In her wrath I'd seen Annie do terrible, terrible things. Of course, I was enjoying it. She was made for the crisp, alarming weather of fall, and watching her as the cold wind hit her face and brought a blush to it, I thought deciding to accompany her had been the best decision I'd made in a while. We walked around the block, quiet and shivering. At the park we found a bench and sat down, and talked. The way her neck curved so gracefully into the rest of her body made you want to reach out and stroke it. Her casual polo shirt was open at the neck, letting your eyes trail down naturally to shadows, both exotic and domestic. She sat like a perched bird, and yet I knew from innumerable summer afternoons at Aunt Linda's house playing football that she could hit you like a pro and curse like a sailor when the occasion warranted. I watched her talk, her lips parting and pouting, and barely heard anything. When she decided it was time to go in I was disappointed and hard pressed to reconstruct how long we'd been out. I let her walk ahead of me on the sidewalk because I had garnered an erection the size of Missouri and then some, and would have been hard pressed to explain it. How did you explain to your cousin that you'd been idly fantasizing about her? The answer was, of course, you didn't. That night with Danny snoring like a rough beast dragging dead legs, I lay awake and stared at the ceiling, feeling hot and dry and nervous. Two doors down, she lay curled up in her pink and purple flannel pajamas, warm and peaceful. I wasn't concerned with the moral and philosophical difficulties deeper men would have found themselves worrying over; rather I was worried about not making a fool of myself. The entire clan, decked out in sober black with their underwear starched and balls squeezed into tight raisins would find no amusement in young James sniffing after his first cousin like a dog. I tossed and turned and finally got up to go smoke a cigarette down in Aunt May's huge and yellow kitchen. You could play team sports in the cavernous room, as long as you avoided the furniture and didn't forget to mind the stove. She had it done in yellow and white to discourage appetite, or so we theorized; cleaning must take days and so cooking would be discouraged. the place also smelled strongly of onions, so I didn't think nicotine would ruin the atmosphere. Annie sat at the table with a lit candle and her own cigarette, wearing just the oversized top of her pajamas. She smiled when she saw me, and I made feeble attempts to not stare too openly at her legs. The old house was packed tight with blood relations; the wake was the next day and we were all looking forward to it. Annie wondered what she would wear; I wondered too but pretended not to. Once she got me laughing it was easier to want her. With the two of us laughing and feeling young I didn't feel the pale excitement death brought to my family, the desperate chattering activity they all engaged in. Mom cooked as if the kingdom of heaven were dragging their shabby corpses over for dinner, Uncle Jimmy busied himself dashing from place to place. Aunt Connie wailed away the hours gleefully. The whole bunch of them truly worshipped their gods only when planting each other with appropriate fanfare. As for me, well, you could lead a horse to water but you couldn't necessarily make him serve drinks. It was 4 in the morning when Annie finally decided she had grown tired enough to go to bed. In a house packed with relatives a kitchen which smelled of onions was the only place you could be alone. I sat by myself listening to the clock, savoring the elbow room. Then I went back up, thought seriously about Annie's legs, and failed to go to sleep. By the time the wake ended, we were fed up with sober clothes and the unfortunately sober people in them, and went to seek more exciting atmosphere. The whole bloody day had been nothing but relatives and handshakes, handshakes and relatives, first filling Aunt May's estate like tourists on holiday, gawking at curiosities and us ghouls as if we were some of them, later overfilling the cramped funeral home. Paul and Dan lay about both places, being sullen and quiet, sitting in the back. I would have loved to have joined them, but Mom kept me up front gladhanding, and Annie felt like keeping me company anyway and that made it halfway enjoyable, smelling her perfume and hearing her nylons rub together as she shifted. Three hours later, our reputations as upstanding young cousins in the family dynasty became low priorities, since an afternoon of schmoozing had left us all doubtful of our desire to be counted amongst them. Whenever we stayed over at Aunt May's we went to Lorrie's Bar to store up sadness and tolerance. It was a good place to generate sadness, being dark and smoky and filled with sad songs, encouraging late nights and deep conversations weighted with thick portent. We always came away from Lorries weeping and carrying on, sure that whoever had died to occasion the trip had been just and undeserving of such an untimely demise. We ghouls didn't start to mourn until we were deathly drunk. We all squeezed around one of the small tables in the back, which left me pressed against Annie on one side and unpleasantly against Paul on the other. We knew we would be in ill favor when we got back; we were too old to get into trouble, really, but old enough to get the cold shoulder treatment. Unpopular as we already were, we knew we could be much more so, and soon would be. Annie summed it up by raising her beer for a toast: "Here's to the Ghouls!" For the first hour, the place was a little too stuffy and much too loud, we were uncomfortably tightly packed and Dan was being more obnoxious than usual. As the second hour gained momentum and my head started buzzing, all these things swam together gracefully to form atmosphere and charm. I even began to detect wit in Dan's bleating guffaws. And then, poor, poor Terrance, who'd been, up until a few days ago, Aunt Connie's husband's stepfather, unknown and shadowy. We toasted his memory and tried, for a while, to bring up recollections of him. We couldn't. Slowly it came out that none of us had any memories of Terrance at all, none of us had met the man at all. This seemed a tragedy, and we vowed to mourn him with greater fervor because we'd never met him, rather than callously let his memory fade from sight. After that, Dan and Paul became distracted by the girls at the bar, and Annie and I had one more each and decided to go home. Walking through the crowd, I put my hand on the small of her back to guide her, and she didn't stop me. We walked home unsteadily, eventually hanging onto each other for support, which really only made it worse. She started telling me how much better company than Paul and Dan I was. I swelled up and pushed against her, feeling chilled and breathless. Back at Aunt May's the place was buzzing with people and filled with food. Everyone said hello when we walked in, but Annie just giggled and grabbed my arm, pulling me upstairs. We went into the room she was sharing with some of our smaller cousins, and shut the door. She had a bottle of wine in with her clothes and we killed it off even though it was horrid stuff, and lay laughing on the floor, gasping into breathless silence. I reached out to play with her hair. We were so close. I could sense her body heat, I could of course smell her perfume. She was the most beautiful woman in the world, watching me from wine-addled half-mast eyes. I knew that if I left her to her own devices she would be asleep in minutes, dozing quietly until she woke up hard the next day. For a moment, we were suspended. I let the curl of hair slip from my fingers and slid my hand around to rest gently against the satin skin of her neck. She stretched slightly at my touch, closing her eyes. Simultaneously, I leaned in and pulled her towards me. She didn't speak or open her eyes, and when our mouths met her lips parted in anticipation. It felt natural and long overdue. When you're under the age of wisdom, as all of us ghouls undoubtedly were, you get used to your share of blurry mornings. There are rituals to observe, and being 25 I had observed most of them, from the chummy just-woke-up cigarette with your fellow heathens to the rocket-out-of-bed hundred yard dash to the toilet. I had even once gone through the motions of the go-to-work-blind rite, staring balefully at sickening coffee for eight hours, throwing up on breaks. You get used to it, and, I suppose, eventually learn a few lessons and stop letting it happen. Or else you ended up like my Uncle Phil, a jittery and despised old man of 45 who was getting left off of a lot of guest lists these days for fear of dwindling booze supplies. I had never, however, woken up with the usual blinding headache and the rather unusual absence of my pants. I stared up at the unfamiliar ceiling for a moment, savoring the peace and quiet before my hangover really hit me. The ceiling, however, was altogether too unfamiliar. I realized this, and could suddenly smell her perfume. I sat up like a shot, blood rushing into heretofore unexplored areas of my brain, and my vision swam badly. She was next to me, crumpled and mussed, her skirt riding high on her smooth tan thighs, her breathing regular and uneventful. Beneath us, the clan had roused itself and was going crazy trying to hose itself off for the planting of Terrance. Several voices drifted close to the door -had we locked it?- and then faded away. Finally I spasmed into action and managed to grab my pants and pull them on. Without considering the consequences I stood up and cast about crazily, looking for anything I might have forgotten. then I grabbed for the door (locked tightly) and rushed out, carried on a warm gust of terror. In a delirium of mourning, we stood amidst a bright sunny day each of us dressed in black, each of us silent and morose. For one blessed moment the whole tribe shut up, and the glory of it made me wonder if there wasn't something to religion after all. We shifted uncomfortably under the weight of the priest's soothing tones; he droned on as if he were trying to bury us all by pressure of voice alone. After we had endured drowsy eternities listening to all the great things Terrance would be getting into now that he'd finally kicked off, they cranked him down real slow and careful. This caused Connie and a few others to burst into wailing fits again, crying out to a God so cruel despite all the great things Terrance would be getting into now that he'd finally kicked off. We fucking Catholics could never figure out if death was the best or the worst thing to happen to us. Finally, it scraped bottom and the flowers were tossed, the dirt rained down and we all got to turn away in relief. Paul and Dan fell in beside me, Dan wondering out loud how screwed we'd all be if the Egyptians had been right about taking it all with you, since we sent everyone off with some flowers and most of their vital organs missing. Paul shared out a crumpled soft pack and told Dan to shut up about death, he'd had enough of death. The rest of the jackals hadn't. They chattered endlessly about the funeral, about death, about Terrance and his funeral and his death. We paused at Dan's car to stare balefully about, each of us thinking the same thing: we weren't the ghouls in the family. They were all around us, smacking their lips and applauding politely for the show. I caught sight of Annie. She was walking with Uncle Jimmy and her Dad, her arms wrapped around herself as if to ward off a chill. After the funeral feast and endless toasts to Terrance's peace and afterlife success, Paul, Dan and I went back to Lorries to vent our frustration. Dan asked Annie to come along but she replied stiffly that she didn't feel up to it and we left it at that. I wanted her to come along, I really did, but in a way I was just as glad. Better, I figured, to enjoy myself with Paul and Dan than to be uncomfortable all night. I decided to skip the beers and ordered whiskey in sodas right off the bat. The three of us laughed about the ingrained cruelty of wakes, the I'm-alive-and-you're-dead giddiness of the celebration. by the fourth round of drinks we were having such a good time I felt bad for Annie so I made my smiling way to the pay phone and called Aunt May's. Annie, however, had already left; she'd gone home with her Dad shortly after dinner. I hung up the phone and stared leadenly at it, feeling my high wither away, leaving me just drunk. I stayed in the booth until I'd used up all the air in it, and then forced myself out, back into the thin crowd. Regret is a word I had never truly understood. I had a speech prepared for her answering machine. After weeks of messages I counted her machine as a friend, a familiar crackle and whine that was comforting in its perpetuity. Any time I called, day or night, I could count on its cool and inhuman wheeze. I had even come to prefer its silent listening; there was no one else I wanted to speak to. I would talk on and on until the tape ran out, monologues about faith and hope and sin and failure. When it finally disconnected me, I would hang up. The next day a fresh tape would be waiting. Just when I began to wonder how long it would go on before she realized I couldn't stop, she changed her number. I had a speech prepared and without warning the harsh computer voice sent me packing, artlessly. I breathed a sigh of relief. Regret becomes a part of you, like an organ or a muscle, though, it grows with exercise. I began to watch my older relatives carefully, judging lifespans and illnesses against the odds, looking forward to our next funeral party, grinning like a jackal in anticipation. ======================================== "Of Course everything has been said that needs to be said - but since no one was listening it has to be said again." - Anonymous ======================================== WHY NOT SUBSCRIBE TO THE INNER SWINE? $5/year, $9/two years, four issues a year. A BARGAIN, YOU CHEAP BASTARDS. Write us at PO Box 3024, Hoboken, NJ 07030 or subscriptions@innerswine.com for more information.